Yes SIC, absolutely right about the relative difficulty in flying nowadays. Anyone, who can walk and talk at the same time, can raise the money and pass a few simple exams can do it. All this nonsense about ‘the mortality factor’ is just that. The sophistication and reliability of aircraft now means that flying is much safer and will continue to get more so. Danny and co are desperately trying to hang onto the myth, it is simply not necessary to manually fly NDB’s etc they are history and when the civil world catches up with the military in using three dimensional GPS, which in the interests of safety will happen, then you won’t need ‘pilots’ with any hours but systems operators monitoring the control of events from the ground if that. No one thought forty years ago that driverless trains would happen. As for pilots saving lives, unfortunately it is usually the other way around, if the aircraft malfunctions your chances of surviving are statistically poor. For every DC10 hero there are a dozen muppets witness the Cyprus incident. In any case it is the licensing authority that will determine the experience requirements for the issue of a licence not the airline. Similar things are planned for JAR licenses.